From: Dirk Munk [munk@home.nl]
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 3:03 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Re: USB on OpenVMS

A small update on this matter:

The Lucent USS344 chip is also known or rebranded as Agere USS344S .
Another company that produces a interface card with this chip is Vivanco 
from Germany.
http://www.vivanco.com

Partnumber of the card is KWE 580W. I just bought one, now I'm waiting 
for my VMS 7.3-1 CD-Rom :-)

Regards,

Dirk

Forrest Kenney wrote:

>    The history of USB and OpenVMS where it has been and where it is
>going.  There has been an ongoing effort to
>get USB into OpenVMS.  The original plan was to support it with the DS10
>ES40 platform.  As part of this work we
>built and for a limited time supplied a USB kit for a V7.2 code base.
>This code was also demonstrated at the San Decus
>in 1999.  At that time the plan was to ship full support for USB as part
>of V7.3.  But plans changed for a number of
>reasons and the work was put on hold.
>
>    When it was obvious that some of the new  platforms would not have any
>of the legacy ISA I/O devices work was
>restarted and the code was dug out of mothballs.  We recently finished up
>all the work that we know of to make USB
>viable on these new platforms.  Officially only the embedded USB
>controllers on these platforms are supported and
>only for keyboards and mice.  All of the supported code is checked into
>the version that is presently in field test.
>
>    In addition support for keyboards, mice, we are shipping drivers for
>printers and cables that conform the the USB
>printer standard.  We also have support for modems that conform to the
>communications class standard.  These are not
>going to be listed as supported because we did not have the resources to
>test and qualify devices for this relase.  Please
>feel free to use them and report problems but don't be surprised if you
>get a these are not supported answer from the
>support organizations.
>
>    What is not supported at the present time:
>
>              1) UHCI controllers, or USB 2.0 controllers
>              2) Any random OHCI based controllers.  We have tested and
>had good luck with ones based on the
>                  Lucent USS344 chip and Symbios 6080.  We have tried some
>other with varying degrees of success.
>              3) Customer written drivers
>
>Forrest Kenney
>OpenVMS USB project leader
>
>